Forgive Haitian debt, religious leaders urge

Grants, not loans, for rebuilding

Feb 23, 2010

Appeals for the world’s banking leaders to cancel the remaining foreign debt owed by earthquake-devastated Haiti were made in late January by the leader of the World Council of Churches and by a newly founded alliance of U.S. Christian leaders.

New WCC general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran, said January 25 that the international community must “focus on how Haiti can become sustainable.” Tveit was to take that message days later to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss winter resort of Davos.

In Washington, the new Evangelical Partnership for Common Good an nounced January 22 a petition signed by 66 Christian leaders, many of them known as progressive evangelicals, calling on all nations and institutions that have made loans to the Haitian government “to quickly and completely forgive these debts.”